“Peter Tatchell will still be able to speak; indeed, in the end, his voice has been lent greater weight by the controversy.”
Photograph: Felix Clay for the Guardian

Peter Tatchell, a racist? Not even the activist’s most reactionary enemies had the cynical cunning to think of that one. In his extraordinary 50-year career as a political campaigner, Tatchell has faced many unjustified slurs on his character as part of concerted attempts to shut him up. But it took an officer of the National Union of Students to denounce him as a bigot.

In doing so, Fran Cowling, the NUS’s lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) representative, has transformed a debate that is due to take place at Canterbury Christ Church University on Monday evening from an obscure discussion on the most effective way of pushing forward the case for gay rights, into a referendum on the merits of the controversial “no platform” policy which has become such a fraught subject over the last year or so.

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Cowling wrote to the event organisers explaining that she would not participate in the event if Tatchell were present. She argued that his signature on a letter to the Observer last year about moves to prevent Germaine Greer and others from speaking on campuses because their views were deemed outrageous, revealed him as a racist and a transphobe. Anyone who is even glancingly familiar with Tatchell’s life’s work will see this as the ignorant slur that it is, and Tatchell is quite right to denounce it as an outrageous, evidence-free libel. But in rolling our eyes at such thoughtless hysteria, we should take care that we don’t also start frothing at the mouth.

Cowling’s view is, no doubt, extreme. But it isn’t no-platforming. If she wants to refuse to engage with one of the most experienced and committed radical campaigners in the country, that is her great loss, but she is within her rights to do so. Her view doesn’t represent a corporate policy on the part of the NUS. And it is she who will be absent from the debate, not Tatchell. He will still be able to speak; indeed, in the end, his voice has been lent greater weight by the controversy.

Like Elvis’s gyratory dancing or the inexplicable popularity of YouTube stars, the no-platforming controversy has become one of those markers of intergenerational incomprehension: I am yet to meet anyone over 21 who thinks that silencing debate in this way is a good idea. But also like those other cultural phenomena, the befuddlement of an older generation does not seem likely to make it go away.

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The kneejerk astonishment that puts Cowling’s witless individual decision in the same league as forcing anyone whose views you disagree with to stay silent, is hardly likely to persuade advocates of no-platforming that their approach is unwise. Instead, it shares the worst characteristics of that intolerant world view: unsubtle, aggressive, flattening of all gradations of opinion that you disagree with so that you may more easily write off your opponents as a bunch of morons.

This kind of oversimplification of debate is the cardinal sin of the no-platforming crowd, and it is rightly resisted across the political spectrum by those who would rather live in a world where difference of opinion is tolerated, and people are allowed to hold unsavoury views if they insist on doing so. This attitude gains its moral weight from the conviction that the best way to drive out bad arguments is with good ones. In opposing that sort of nonsense, we must be terribly careful not to replicate its mistakes.

If Fran Cowling wants to run away from Peter Tatchell, let her do so. The only voice that she is silencing is her own.